Ken Schwaber has a great presentation where he talks about the Innovator’s Dillemma and how companies build a (design) dead core.

A typical (success) story

• Management – we need to hit the date.
• Developers – OK, we’ll cut quality but won’t tell you.
• Success! We made the date. We’re heroes!

BUT, this is a horrible long term strategy because you get a design-dead core and can no longer ship product.

Design-dead core

Do you have  a design-dead core?  Here’s a quick checklist (see mindmap below):

1. The code is fragile: difficult to work with and things break unpredictably
2. Little or no automated test harness.
3. Few experts who really understand the technology.

Innovator’s Dilemma

The purported dilemma is that you need to choose between fast delivery and maintainability. So, if you want to get to market fast you need to take shortcuts that are going to hinder you in the long run.

This is also called the inventor’s dilemma.

Agile to the Rescue

Teams that follow Agile practices avoid this peril in two ways.

By managing features and scope, teams can find the most valuable software to deliver by a certain date.

Technical practices such as automated testing, continuous integration and refactoring keep a code base healthy and maintainable. They also helps teams go faster.

Release Burndown to illustrate the Innovator’s Dilemma

Consider the chart below. Companies start at burndown line A. If they use Agile, they will stay there. Most companies don’t. So, release by release, they accumulate technical debt and the code base decays.  After a few years, they build a design-dead core.

As a coach, I like to show teams the chart below and vote on their code base. Many companies are at line C with some area’s that are D.

Help! I have a dead core!

OK, so you’ve got a dead core. Sad news. There are ways to recover. I’d suggest you start with Michael Feather’s book Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

Watch the video

The whole video is great, but for the part explaining the Innovator’s dilemma check out:

• Start: 35:38
• Stop: 45:07

Someone was asking what tools I use to create the visual notes and mind maps.  Perhaps the most important is to trust myself that whatever I am drawing is OK and will communicate ideas better than plain text.

I use the following supplies from DeSerres art store:

• I like the Manga markers since they have really nice flow and give sense of grace.
• The Staedtler fineline is good for adding lots of details and little pictures.
• You can’t see it here, but the 8.5″ by 11″ sketch pad is perforated so I can tear off the sheets and scan them in.
• I also sometimes use 11″ by 17″ sheets of paper with a Sharpie FinePoint for big picture thinking.

Visual note taking is a handy skill that I learned in a series of webinars: I only saw parts of this one and most of this one.  This is a good thing to do as a team/group activity.

This is another talk from Agile 2009 – by Liz Sedly and Rachel Davies.   I think it is an excerpt from their new book - Agile Coaching – but I have not read it yet so can’t say for sure.  Yves Hanoulle says the book is good.

The 1 to 10 is pretty self-explanatory.  Post a comment if you would like elaboration or check out Mark Levison’s post on InfoQ.

The bonus section is what the audience contributed as their top tips.

Also, if you like this, check out my other post on 10 Temptations of an Agile Coach.